News and views about legal academia and the legal profession by Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Dan Filler (Drexel University)

August 22, 2007

Johnson, former Minnesota Dean, to Return to UVA Faculty

Alex Johnson (critical race theory), who served as Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School for four years, is rejoining the law faculty at the University of Virginia, which he left to become Dean at Minnesota.

August 20, 2007

Per Capita Scholarly Impact Study for 2007 Will be On-Line in September

We have finished the scholarly impact study described here. We ranked the top 35 law faculties based on per capita mean and median scholarly impact based on citations to each member of the faculty since 2000. The complete results will be on-line in September, including instructions for schools wanting to complete comparative self-studies. Adjustments will be made if it turns out that schools not studied would have had a rounded mean per capita impact of 140 or higher or a rounded median per capita impact of 90 or higher. Cass Sunstein had 6180 cites at the time of the study, so any increase in his total will provide the relevant discount factor to be applied to the results. I'm posting here some previews of the results.

Here are the top twenty for mean per capita scholarly impact across the whole faculty (the number in parentheses is the normalized score, which makes for more meaningful comparison than the ordinal rank). The big story in these results, it seems to me, is the recovery of the Duke faculty from its doldrums at the turn of the century: their aggressive lateral recruiting has paid off. (And note that even without Chemerinsky, whose treatises generate huge numbers of citations, Duke would still have ranked 8th!) Also striking is the toll that raids by Harvard and Columbia have taken on the UVA faculty.

1. Yale University (100)

2. University of Chicago (95)

3. Stanford University (84)

4. Harvard University (75)

5. Columbia University (54)

6. New York University (53)

7. University of California, Berkeley (49)

8. Duke University (47)

9. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (35)

10. University of California, Los Angeles (34)

10. University of Texas, Austin (34)

12. Georgetown University (33)

12. Northwestern University (33)

14. Cornell University (32)

14. Vanderbilt University (32)

16. University of Pennsylvania (30)

17. University of Virginia (28)

18. George Washington University (27)

18. University of Illinois (27)

20. University of Arizona (25)

The full results will also include rankings by median per capita impact, and by an amalgmation of mean and median per capita impact.

Using the same data, I'll also compile some lists of most-cited scholars in various fields, as I did a number of years ago. Here, for example, is the new "top ten" most cited list for "Law and Philosophy"; after each name is the institutional affiliation, then the number of citations since 2000, and the scholar's age in 2007:

1. Ronald Dworkin (New York University): 3070 citations, age 76

2. Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago): 1130 citations, age 60

3. Jeremy Waldron (New York University): 1120 citations, age 54

4. Larry Alexander (University of San Diego): 980 citations, age 64

5. Michael S. Moore (University of Illinois): 920 citations, age 64

6. Joseph Raz (Columbia University): 840 citations, age 68

7. Jules Coleman (Yale University): 760 citations, age 60

8. John Finnis (University of Notre Dame): 640 citations, age 67

9. Brian Leiter (University of Texas): 410 citations, age 44

10. Brian Bix (University of Minnesota): 370 citations, age 45

10. Jeffrie Murphy (Arizona State University): 370 citations, age 67

10. Charles Taylor (Northwestern University): 370 citations, age 76

Here is a similar list for tax (since I don't know this field, I may well have missed someone whose publications and citations are primarily in tax--e-mail me corrections):

There were several runners-up to the top ten here, whose citation counts were awfully close to the top ten: Robert Peroni (University of Texas) with 230 citations; Marjorie Kornhauser (Arizona State University) with 220 citations; Alvin Warren (Harvard University) with 220 citations; and Lawrence Zelenak (Duke University) with 220 citations. Some scholars, of course, work across different fields. My colleague at Texas Mark Gergen also had 290 citations, but these were about evenly divided between his tax scholarship and his private law scholarship. So, too, Kyle Logue at Michigan had 250 citations, but many to his work on torts and insurance, others to his tax work. No doubt there are other scholars in a similar situation.

Here, finally, are the "top ten" most cited scholars working in constitutional/public law:

Runners-up for the top ten here are Richard Delgado (University of Pittsburgh) and Philip Frickey (University of California, Berkeley), each with 1560 citations, and Sanford Levinson (University of Texas) with 1510 citations. Richard Epstein (University of Chicago), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University), and Ronald Rotunda (George Mason University) all were cited enough to make the top ten here, but because they do substantial work in more than one field (in Epstein's case, the work cuts across many areas of law), they have not been included in the list above. (Arguably, Sunstein's work presents a similar issue, though his citation count is so high that even if we were to subtract, e.g., all the citations to the behavioral law and economics work, he would, in all likelihood, still be first on the list.)

August 17, 2007

In case you were wondering about the names and affiliations of the 300+ law professors who are now blogging...

...Daniel Solove (George Washington) has the information you seek! Soon it will be easier to compile a list of law professors who are not blogging. (Of course, the number who are listed as being members of a blog and the number who actually blog are quite different.)

An Illuminating Review of Roberto Unger's Most Recent Book

August 14, 2007

Wall Street Journal's Ranking of Colleges in Terms of Success of Their Graduates in Gaining Admission to Elite Professional Schools

I just discovered this ranking of colleges by The Wall Street Journal is four years old, but interesting nonetheless. The WSJ looked at the percentage of graduates from each college who were admitted to "elite" professional schools in the fields of business, law, and medicine. This, of course, will penalize schools which have unusually large numbers of its undergraduates that go on for PhD work, rather than professional school (one suspects this is true for Reed College, which comes in 50th, or the University of Chicago, which comes in 14th, or Cal Tech, which comes in 28th). Still, this ranking conveys more useful information than U.S. News, and its results jibe with anecdotal impressions. It also provides a useful way of putting liberal arts colleges and research universities on the same metric.

The choice of "elite" professional schools is, however, a bit idiosyncratic. For medical schools, they looked at Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Califiornia at San Francisco, and Yale--but not at Penn or Washington University in St. Louis or Stanford! For business schools, they looked at Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and the University of Chicago--but not Northwestern or Stanford! And for law schools, they looked at Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Yale--but not NYU or Stanford! (This is beginning to look like an anti-Stanford bias!) Would the results have been much different? One suspects that Stanford (feeder score of 10.70%) would have fared as well as Yale (17.96%) and Princeton (15.78%) if the top five business, law, and medical schools there had been included.

August 11, 2007

American Lawyer Survey of Associates

Associates aren't miserable, except perhaps in certain high-pressure New York precincts. The average satisfaction score hit a record high this year: 3.81 on a five-point scale....

Associates don't plan on staying. Despite the high level of job satisfaction, only 44.9 percent of the respondents predicted that they would be at their firms in five years, and only 11.7 percent expected that they would become equity partners at their current firm....

There may not be enough lawyers to feed the hiring appetite. According to our survey of summer associate hires, Am Law 200 firms expect to bring on roughly 10,000 associates next fall. That astonishing number equals about one-quarter of all the students who will graduate from U.S. law schools next year. To put it another way, the top 20 law schools will only produce about 6,500 graduates.

What do these four facts mean? For law firms, at least three things. First, in the short run, the war for talent will become more ferocious. Second, the cost of talent will only increase. And third, the need for firms to differentiate themselves will become apparent even to the hidebound.

August 9, 2007

Five Legal Scholars Elected to the British Academy

The British Academy press release is here. The new Ordinary Fellows are: Andrew Burrows (commercial law, restitution, torts) at Oxford University; Ross Cranston (commercial law and history of commercial law) at the London School of Economics; Anthony Ogus (economic analysis of law) at the University of Manchester; and Genevra Richardson (law and psychiatry, administrative law, prison law) at King's College London. The new Corresponding Fellow is Peter Cane (law of obligations, administrative law, legal theory) of the Australian National University (who also taught for twenty years at Oxford before moving to the ANU in 1997).

August 6, 2007

More on the Proposed New ABA Bar Pass Standard for Law Schools...

August 5, 2007

Silly Article in Boston Magazine about Harvard and Noah Feldman

Here. The reporter struck me as unusually dumb, and was fixated on the idea that "big egos" at Harvard Law School couldn't get along because they were "big egos." Although I repeatedly gave him alternative, and more plausible, explanations for why the school, until Dean Kagan, had been unable to do a lot of lateral hiring, he was not to be dissuaded, as the final product makes clear. Time to quote Karl Kraus: "No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist."